Reunited: after 18 years Medhane Berhane meets his family at Asmara airport this July

Maheder Haileselassie Tadese · AFP · Getty

A peaceful revolution has transformed relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Apart from a few skirmishes, such as Ethiopia’s 2006 intervention against Eritrea’s allies in Somalia. they have coexisted peacefully since the 1998-2000 war, even though their dictators have often talked of the threat of renewed conflict.

Ethiopia initiated the change this April with the appointment of a new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, previously an unknown senior official at the Information Network Security Agency (Ethiopia’s Internet and phone surveillance agency) and a member of the Oromo ethnic group, many of whom are secessionists. Trying to halt the decline of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime, he quickly began a series of reforms, including freeing political prisoners, liberalising the media and recognising the political opposition.

Ethiopia has a symbolic status in Africa as the continent’s only uncolonised country. so nothing that happens there is without significance. After the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, a Stalinist military regime headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam ruled until 1991. A 15-year civil war followed, after which the EPRDF, founded by Meles Zenawi, took power. The EPRDF is a coalition of ethnically based parties dominated by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which follows a reformist and authoritarian neo-Marxism.

In this period of change, nobody seems willing to risk re-establishing order in the name of a constitution that no one can interpret convincingly. Ethiopia’s budding civil society cannot yet help

The regime’s dictatorial tendencies, long masked by economic vigour (growth has averaged 7% since 2005), became apparent after Meles’s death in 2012, when the government began to crack under the pressure of regional disparities. Ethno-regionalists among its leaders pretended to back democratisation to win the sympathy of the international community, hiding their (...)

(2) Italy’s brief occupation of Ethiopia (1936-41) was an early episode of the second world war rather than part of Africa’s colonial history. Eritrea, colonised in 1882, has a separate history within Abyssinia.